Give the fossil fuel industry free rein!http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/a-modest-proposal-for-2015
In 1729, Jonathan Swift published the most famous satirical essay in the English language: A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. And what was Swift’s proposal? Merely that the one-year-old children of indigents be eaten, thus solving the problems of poverty and overpopulation at a stroke.

Poverty and overpopulation are still with us, of course, but sadly, such bold ideas to solve these problems are in short supply today. Meanwhile, the world’s current level of 7 billion is straining resources to the limit. Certainly the earth cannot support in health and comfort the 9 billion expected to swarm upon its surface by mid-century. Action must be taken -- immediate, forceful action -- to reduce the human population and re-balance the planet before it is too late. No person of good conscience can view televised scenes of squalor in the teeming cities of Africa and Asia -- and even, if reports are to be believed, in parts of our own country -- without feeling called upon to make a difference.

Fortunately, thanks to the generative genius of capitalism, the fossil fuel industry is positioned to solve this problem, while simultaneously generating good-paying jobs and unimaginable amounts of money. The release of greenhouse gases by this industry has already set the world on a trajectory toward irreversible climate change, which will ultimately bring about the population readjustment that all thinking people wish for. And companies from ExxonMobil to BP to Koch Industries to Syncrude stand ready to do so much more.

However, through no fault of their own, these corporations have not been as effective as they might be. Last year, barely over a million acres of new oil and gas leases were sold on America’s public lands, and the industry was forced to make due with only $18.5 billion in government subsidies. Meanwhile, endless red tape has imposed restrictive regulations on emissions, delayed the construction of essential pipelines like the Keystone XL, and waged a pitiless War on Coal. President Obama even signed an emissions-reducing deal with China. It is obvious to all sensible people that this is going in exactly the wrong direction.

My modest proposal is simply this: Set the fossil fuel industry free. Open the valves fully on greenhouse gas emissions. The near-term profits will be immense. In the slightly longer term (after most of our generation are safely off the stage), this plan will produce a bracing readjustment of earth’s ecological systems, resulting in much-needed population reduction through droughts, crop failures, and coastal inundation. And don’t worry about your children or grandchildren. Surely the wealth they inherit will insulate them from whatever unpleasantness may come in the overpopulated parts of the world.

I acknowledge that there are a few misguided individuals who will urge a different course. They fancifully suggest that carbon emissions be immediately and drastically reduced, with the goal of keeping atmospheric CO2 below 450 parts per million. This is the threshold that international climate negotiators have identified as providing a 50 percent chance of avoiding the impacts of catastrophic climate change. The level is almost 400 ppm today. To keep it below 450 ppm would cost the fossil fuel industry the equivalent of $28 trillion in revenues over the next two decades, according to published estimates. The only possible response to such an idea is a hearty laugh. When in the history of the world have corporations or governments passed up such wealth?

Nothing makes me angrier than those self-righteous “greens,” who profess to love the earth, but who do nothing but fiddle about with this little regulation here, that little lawsuit there, and never talk about population at all. To use a well-worn phrase, they are merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I say, aim the Titanic straight at that rapidly melting iceberg! Throw more coal into the boilers! Full steam ahead! The earth will thank us. Eventually.

Joel Pett

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). A writer and naturalist, he is co-author of Shifting Patterns: Meditations on Climate Change in Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley (www.shiftingpatterns.org). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherWriters on the RangeClimate ChangeOpinion2015/02/02 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleTen lessons from the American Robinhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/ten-lessons-from-the-american-robin
For climate activists, this feels like the last moment. The huge marches in New York and other cities around the world were a reflection, among other things, of desperation. How loud must we scream before our so-called leaders will listen? How many hundreds of thousands must fill the streets before any of those leaders act?

In times like these, we need both the perspective and renewal of energy to be gained from nature’s teaching. Many famous fables feature the attributes of animals we may never see in person: the courage of the lion, the memory of the elephant, the teamwork of the wolf pack. But in truth, we need look no farther than our backyards to gain instruction from nature. Here are 10 valuable lessons I have learned from a species so familiar that we take it for granted: the American robin.

1. It’s good to be common

The American robin is one of the most common and widespread native birds in North America. Their large population gives robins great resilience in the face of ecological and climatic challenges.

Build the movement.

2. Adapt to where you are

Robins are found from steamy Southern swamps to the Alaskan tundra. Their remarkable ability to adapt to local conditions and resources is the secret of their success.

Tailor your message and manner to local conditions.

3. And also have one special skill

For all their adaptability, robins also have a unique and specialized skill: their earthworm-hunting behavior, which opens up a rich resource few other birds exploit.

Know your special talent and make the most of it.

4. Figure out how to take advantage of the dominant paradigm

Robins thrive in part because of their ability to make the most of human environments, nesting in our backyards and foraging on our lawns.

Don’t be afraid to make alliances and to engage with mass media.

5. Be alert for phonies

Robins are among the few birds able to detect and toss out the eggs of the parasitic brown-headed cowbird, thus protecting their nests from invaders.

Welcome only those who truly share your values.

6. Know when to move on

Throughout their wide range, robins exhibit facultative migration – that is, they adjust their winter residency to specific conditions. In a cold winter, they head south; if the next year is mild, they may remain resident all year.

Know when to stage a tactical retreat, in order to win another time.

7. Encourage the young

Robins often produce two broods of offspring per year. That gives them a huge advantage over less-fecund species.

There’s no substitute for the energy and idealism of the young when building a movement.

8. Be confident

Robins are often described as “bold,” “confident,” and “confiding,” in contrast to related birds like the shy varied thrush. There is no doubt that the outgoing behavior of robins has contributed greatly to their success.

Believe in your cause whole-heartedly, and others will, too.

9. Be friendly

In addition to their boldness, robins appeal to us because they’re friendly – even if they’re keeping us company in the garden simply in order to snatch up earthworms.

A friendly, positive approach will gain many more listeners than one wrapped in doom and gloom.

10. Sing!

For many of us, the rich warbling song of the robin announces the arrival of spring, lifting our spirits after the hard winter. Isn’t a beautiful message what we all want to hear?

Sing!

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He is a biologist and writer in Oregon.

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2014/10/21 10:25:00 GMT-6ArticleHot Mess and other fears for the futurehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.7/hot-mess-and-other-fears-for-the-future
How we worry about a dystopian future. I live in an idyllic little Western town, rich in natural beauty and culture. I have a great family, no pressing health or financial worries – in short, it's a utopian life. And yet … somehow I can't leave it at that. I can't tune out the news, can't ignore economic and political injustices, and as a biologist, I really can't ignore climate change and what it will mean for the natural world I love. When I lift my gaze out of this valley, what I see is discouraging, depressing, and, on some days, downright terrifying: a dystopian future.

There's no question that far too many people in this country struggle to make ends meet. Still, many of us are lucky enough to live comfortably. We go through our days dealing with "first-world problems" – fender-benders, delayed airplane flights, slow Internet connections – all the while feeling in our bones that bad times are coming. And so we're irresistibly drawn to dystopian books and movies, obsessed by what might be over the horizon. Judging by what we watch and read, we're worried about three things: environmental collapse, corporate/technocratic domination, and zombies. Especially zombies. So let's start there.

Zombies are the monsters of the moment because they're … us. Awkwardly lurching, oblivious to their surroundings, incapable of human connection, always searching, never satisfied –– does this sound like any Bluetooth-wearing, text-messaging, video-game-playing, Web-surfing person you know? The proliferation of zombie movies and TV shows reflects our anxiety about ourselves and what we are becoming. In this brave new cyber-world, we wield untold forces of information. But are we losing our skills as human beings? What do you think? Hello? Hello?

Meanwhile, movies as diverse as The Bourne Identity, The Hunger Games and the new release Divergent imagine a world in which shadowy figures control the levers of power, and the rest of us dance to a tune we aren't even allowed to hear. A world, you could say, just like the one we live in. It's hard to argue with that, given our everyday reality of pervasive electronic surveillance, assassination-by-drone and corporations "too big to fail."

Finally, we play out our fears of a dystopian future with visions of environmental collapse. During the height of the Cold War, apocalyptic movies like On the Beach, Fail-Safe and even (spoiler alert) Planet of the Apes imagined a world laid waste by nuclear war. How old-fashioned! These days, we're much more worried that tomorrow's apocalypse will be environmental, either due to climate change, as in movies like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, or through pandemics brought on by our meddling with the natural world, as in Contagion and I Am Legend. The trend is even clearer in books: A recent search on Amazon.com for "climate change fiction" returned 650 results; my favorite title was Hot Mess: Speculative Fiction about Climate Change.

The latest studies from the National Academy of Sciences predict a temperature increase of 4.7-8.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century if the current rate of emissions continues, and conclude: "If emissions of CO2 stopped altogether … surface temperatures would stay elevated for at least a thousand years, implying extremely long-term commitment to a warmer planet due to past and current emissions. ..."

I'm convinced that the world to come will look terribly damaged to me. But I don't want to live in dread of the future. I want to feel grateful for the blessings of my life. I want to believe in utopia as well as dystopia.

In this matter, as in so many other problems that defy a logical solution, I find an answer in poetry. The great English poet William Blake wrote,

To see a world in a grain of sandAnd a heaven in a wild flower,Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,And eternity in an hour.

The Japanese haiku master Issa gave us:

This worldis a dewdrop worldyes … but. …

The flower, even if it's just a weed in a vacant lot, gives us beauty, a vision of heaven. The dewdrop may seem small and fleeting, but within it the world is contained and preserved. In the worst, most damaged corners of the planet, from the slums of Calcutta to the industrial wastelands of Detroit, I have found beauty. Amid all my fears about a dystopian future, I have one certainty: There will still be beauty. And there, in that small infinity, in that brief eternity, utopia will abide, waiting to be found.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2014/04/28 04:10:00 GMT-6ArticleWhy we don’t "get" climate changehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/why-we-dont-get-climate-change
Does humanity’s poor time-depth perception explain our lack of environmental coordination?Remember that kid from elementary school, the one with the terrible depth perception? That was me. I fell down stairs, missed the next rung on the monkey bars, and could always be counted on to drop the easiest pop fly. But I eventually grew out of that, and these days my depth perception is probably as good as the next guy’s. My spatial depth perception, that is. On the other hand, my ability to perceive and react to the depths of time remains terrible -- just like everyone else’s.

Lately, I’ve come to believe that humanity’s poor time-depth perception explains our lack of environmental coordination. Basing all our plans on a paltry few decades of experience -- or at most a century or two of records -- we ignore the clear lessons of the deep past and insist on building and rebuilding in floodplains and fire-prone forests. We dam rivers and drain wetlands with little thought for the long-term consequences. We eliminate enormous populations of passenger pigeons and bison, overfish stock after stock, and still are stunned each time it happens again.

There’s no question that time has depth. Planet Earth is billions of years old. Events like the advance and retreat of ice sheets are so brief that they hardly register on the geological time scale, which is measured in eons and eras, each many millions of years long. By comparison, the Earth’s spatial dimensions are trivial. I will never climb Mount Everest, but on my Saturday hikes I often average five and a half miles, which is about the height of that highest peak above sea level. I just have to imagine going up a mountain, instead of across a landscape. Plus, we have plenty of other tools at our disposal -- cars and ships and airplanes -- that allow us to take the measure of the world, to travel to its remotest corners.

By contrast, our experience of time can’t be mechanically enhanced. It is simply gained the painful and old-fashioned way: by getting older, day by day and year by year. Of course, we can improve our time-depth perception by using science and imagination. The insights into the history of the Earth provided by geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology are amazing.

It has been millions of years since dinosaurs walked the Earth, but every child holds a vivid imaginative picture of those incredible creatures, thanks to the painstaking work of scientists. And yet, how little thought do we grownups spare for our planet’s past!

Against all evidence, we believe that the world we grew up with is the norm, and that any changes we notice are mere temporary fluctuations in the status quo that will pass. This belief in a stable natural world has never been less accurate -- or more dangerous -- than it is today. Climate scientists and ecologists have no doubt that climate change, or, more aptly, climate chaos, will transform the planet’s habitats in the coming decades. But they have surprisingly little confidence in their ability to predict what the world to come will be like. Indeed, climate change ecologists commonly use an ominous-sounding term: “the no-analog future.” That is, they believe that the future world will resemble nothing that we’ve ever seen before.

This is in sharp contrast to how most of us picture the future. To the extent that we accept the likelihood of any climate-driven changes at all, we expect simple northward shifts of the habitats we know. Let’s say temperatures in San Francisco will come to resemble those in Southern California today. Well, then, we expect that the plant life of the Bay Area will become more like that around Los Angeles.

Unfortunately for this orderly picture, studies of past environments suggest that major climate changes shuffle species into new and unpredictable arrangements. The associations that seem so natural and permanent today, say, between pines and oaks in the California foothills, or between sagebrush and juniper in the Great Basin, may fall apart in the future. What new arrangements will come … well, if we think we know, we are kidding ourselves. To prepare for this chaotic future world, the best we can do is to try to slow the pace of climate change and preserve as many species as we can, to give nature a chance to adapt with as little dislocation as possible.

Back in elementary school, when my depth perception finally started to improve, I figured out that to catch that pop fly, I had to keep my eye on the ball and move to where it was going to come down. As environmental changes come hard and fast, will we be able to do something similar -- anticipate and adapt and keep our eye on the rapidly moving ball? Let’s hope so, because our very future will depend on our depth perception -- of time.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He is a biologist and writer who lives in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeWriters on the Range2013/10/08 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleLook! Shooting stars!http://www.hcn.org/wotr/look-shooting-stars
A naturalist’s advice: pay attentionMy favorite Oregon wildflowers are called shooting stars, delicate darts whose blossoms with their sharp-pointed anthers and swept-back magenta petals seem to hurtle toward the soft spring earth from their height of six inches or so. These are among the first flowers to appear in our oak woodlands, long before the oaks themselves show any inclination to bud, and they dry up and disappear with the first blast of summer heat. Scattered here and there in brown grass, shooting stars are surprisingly easy to overlook. Once you notice them, however, their intense color and graceful shapes arrest the eye, and suddenly it’s hard to see anything else.

This weekend, I was finally able to get out into the Oregon springtime after several weeks of travel. As an avid birder, I was curious to see what birds had arrived in my absence, but first, I needed to make sure that I hadn’t missed the shooting stars. No; there they were, at the peak of their splendor.

This splendor is intense, but intimate. Shooting stars do not create gaudy displays like the bluebonnets in Texas or poppies in the California foothills. They do not paint whole hillsides with color. You can only perceive them by standing among them, and they are best appreciated from just a few inches away, preferably while you’re lying on your belly in the spring sunshine. I spent a few hours doing just that, lying among the flowers, listening to the ardent trilling of the chorus frogs in the stock pond down the hill and the scissoring calls of hungry swallows streaking over my head. As time passed, it gradually became real to me that I was home again, back in place.

By a marvelous coincidence, this same late-April weekend marked the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower. So, in the middle of the night, I again found myself lying down outside, on my back this time. Again I was looking at shooting stars, but these were miles, not inches, away; astronomical, not botanical. Seemingly utterly different, both kinds of shooting stars had these things in common: they demanded my full attention, they were beautiful, and they were brief.

The trip I had just returned from was a natural history cruise in South America, with me as one of the naturalists. Lying in the dark, waiting for the next shooting star, I had the leisure to reflect on that rather odd role, the official naturalist. What did my tour members expect from me, and did I succeed in providing it? The paying customers expected a high degree of expertise, of course. Indeed, they often assumed an entirely implausible degree of expertise – as if, faced with the staggering and frequently uncatalogued diversity of the Amazon, we could identify every blossom, butterfly and bird call. They also expected not to be bored; professional naturalists need to be entertaining as well as informative. All this was well understood, and I think my colleagues and I successfully met our passengers’ expectations.

But as another meteor flashed across the sky, I saw my role as a naturalist in a different light. Informing and entertaining people are means, not ends –– means toward something more fundamental. What do we owe the natural world that sustains us? The response that I encourage is simply gratitude. And the most basic expression of gratitude is to be mindful of the gift: to pay attention.

We all inhabit routines, routines that add up to our lives, but paradoxically take us out of the actual moments we live in. Travel dislocates those routines, and in that dislocation lies a chance to see more clearly. As a naturalist, my goal is to make the most of this opportunity and encourage people to look at some extraordinary natural thing with intensity and focus. Precisely what they choose to see is up to them, but I can help by pointing out the beauty and fascination that surrounds us.

The shooting star streaking across the sky has spent unimaginable eons drifting as a cinder in space. Its visible existence, when it interacts with other matter, lies in that split second of time as it flares across our sky, and then is gone. The shooting stars that flower beneath the oaks come and go each year, each visible only for a few days, and only seen by those who look.

And so, here is the single most important word I ever say as a naturalist. I have spoken this word in response to anteaters in the Amazon and icebergs in Antarctica, and now, inspired by Oregon shooting stars, I offer it to you: "Look!"

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the Range2013/04/23 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHeading out of fall's impending darknesshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/heading-out-of-falls-impending-darkness
As winter approaches, the author heads to the mountains in search of light.One day in October every year, I leave my home valley and make a pilgrimage up into Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. I am not seeking enlightenment, exactly. I am seeking simply light.

My birthday falls on Oct. 10, long enough past the fall equinox that the ever-growing darkness of autumn can no longer be denied. Every day the sun rises later from behind the valley’s eastern wall, and every day it drops sooner behind the black ridges to the west. During the lengthening nights, summer’s stored-up heat leaves the valley and radiates toward the stars, which glitter ever more brightly. Our tawny-shouldered hills shiver in the morning breeze, and the day always comes when the sky is filled with vultures, rising up on the last weakened thermals until they reach the north wind that carries them away to California, summer’s ragged soldiers in full retreat.

Soon, I know, will come the rain, and then the snow. Soon, the serious dark. This end of nature’s year is also the end of my own -- another birthday, another milestone of my mortality. In the bleak gray October dawn, it can be hard to take.

At the same time, I enjoy melancholy, and autumn is my favorite season. Yet, before I embrace that dark, I need one day of perfect light, light reflected off a forest of brilliant autumn leaves. This can’t be found in my town, where the dominant hardwoods are oaks, whose leaves turn, at best, a somber orange-brown, and where the blazing color of the occasional non-native sugar maple or box elder seems garish and forced. So on a weekend near my birthday, I point my battered Subaru up the Crater Lake Highway, higher and higher, past the last town, past the last dam, into the towering, almost black conifer forests, where the Rogue River runs cold.

For about 50 weeks of the year, this great mountain forest of Douglas-fir, hemlock, and pine is dark green, a place of shadows, large silences and puritanical sobriety. But sometime in October, all is changed, and the huge trees seem to step back as the humble hazels and maples at their feet begin to glow, and glow brighter, and finally blaze with the intimate incandescence of candle flame, until the mountains are filled with a light unlike any other -- warming, piercing, purifying and breathtaking. This is the light I come to seek.

A trail runs along the river here, and this is the route of my pilgrimage. A hundred feet back into the forest, the sun-loving little hardwoods are shaded out, surrendering the spongy ground to mushrooms and deep-forest herbs like vanilla-leaf and pipsissewa. There, the dark conifers remain in shadow. But in this brief season, they merely provide a black backdrop to the brilliance of the hazelnuts and vine maples that line the riverbanks, spreading their leaves in the sun that fed them all summer long, and now illuminates their dying glory.

The hazelnuts grow in dense thickets, and are so beloved by the squirrels that in all my years of hiking through their groves, I have only found a handful of their nuts. It is a mystery how they replace themselves. Their autumn leaves are delicate, first turning a subtle yellow-green, and at their peak attaining a yellow whose translucent pale purity rinses the air with cleansing light.

Vine maples are far more flamboyant. Even as they begin to turn, their star-shaped leaves glow a deep golden yellow, and with the advance of frosty nights, they flame into scarlet, a color the hazels never dare to attempt. The brightest maples always seem to be at the water’s edge, where their colors are stirred by the restless river, a fluid rainbow carried away past the towering conifers, which appear to lean forward for a better look, but say nothing.

I walk through these wonders wide-eyed, and as I breathe, I feel nourished by the light, literally fed until my stomach grows full, electrified until I tingle to my fingertips. This magic never fails, a gift of nature as reliable as the turning of the earth itself. After my day in the forest of light, I return homeward strengthened and prepared: ready for another year, ready for winter, ready for the night.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News(hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2012/10/26 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticlePondering change in the Great Basinhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/pondering-change-in-the-great-basin
Paleontology and geology at Summer Lake, an ancient lake bed in Oregon, have shown the Great Basin's history of dramatic changeI’m standing on the shores of Summer Lake, or, to be more accurate, what used to be a lakeshore but is now a dry lakebed in Oregon’s high desert. I’m here with a group of writers, scientists and artists, all of us gathered to talk about changes in the northern Great Basin.

Sharp environmental contrasts, through both time and space, have always been a feature of life in the Great Basin. We know this because the region’s arid conditions that make living here a challenge are also ideal for preserving the remains of past life.

In lake sediments, packrat stockpiles and even in exquisitely air-dried human dung (coprolites), ecological change has been revealed by the painstaking work of geologists, paleontologists and archeologists. That knowledge has recently been synthesized in a masterful book, The Great Basin: A Natural Prehistory, by Donald K. Grayson of the University of Washington, and it’s required reading for anyone interested in the West.

The most dramatic changes in the Great Basin over the past 100,000 years are the appearance and disappearance of lakes. The Great Basin is comprised of many lesser basins that are connected to some degree, but which have no outlet. In the late Pleistocene, about 15,000 years ago, the Great Basin was a labyrinth of lakes, covering almost 28 million acres by Grayson’s calculation. The largest of these, Lake Bonneville, was almost the size of Lake Michigan and reached depths well over 1,000 feet. Its shriveled remnant is the Great Salt Lake.

Summer Lake, too, was part of a much larger Pleistocene lake, called Lake Chewaucan, which covered 480 square miles and reached a depth of 375 feet. At its springtime maximum these days, Summer Lake is lucky to cover 70 square miles at a maximum depth of three feet. By late summer, the lake has retreated to a puddle, a thin dark smudge almost lost in the heat waves.

The Pleistocene lakes existed when the continental ice sheets deflected the jet stream southward. This brought both high precipitation and cool temperatures, which together filled the basins of the Great Basin. In contrast, the greatest retreat of Great Basin lakes occurred during a period of high temperatures and drought sometimes called the Altithermal, from about 7,500-4,500 years ago. The causes for this climatic shift in the middle Holocene are not well understood, and its effects were not equally severe everywhere. Nevertheless, the implications for the future of the region are sobering.

The Altithermal appears to have been characterized by temperatures 5-15 degrees higher than today; in other words, within the range of predicted Great Basin temperatures by the end of this century. And what were the effects of these temperatures? Many Great Basin lakes and marshes virtually disappeared. The frequency of fires increased, as shown by studies near Lake Tahoe. A variety of mammals associated with sagebrush were replaced by species adapted to drought-tolerant saltbush. The hardy woodrats, whose middens are such a reliable source of data on environmental conditions, disappeared from many sites, to return only after the end of the drought.

Even those most adaptable of creatures, human beings, suffered population declines during the Altithermal. Those who survived were forced to adapt to a diet heavy in small seeds that were extremely labor-intensive to gather and process, and we know this from their, um, coprolites. All in all, Grayson singles out the Altithermal as the least hospitable time for humans in the Great Basin over the past 10,000 years.

This bad time seems to be returning. And the challenges ahead will not be due to climate change alone. Human population density in the Great Basin is far greater than it has ever been, with major cities in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Reno. These urban populations, especially those in Las Vegas, rely on water sources that may not last the century, and most rural residents also depend on readily available water for farming and ranching. It is hard to imagine how these populations can be sustained in the face of conditions approaching those of the Altithermal.

The dry bed, or playa, of Summer Lake, has a stark beauty. Every evening, our group gathers on its salty edge to watch the shadow of Winter Ridge roll smoothly across it as the sun sets. The history of the Great Basin assures us that this lake will be brim-full again -- in a thousand, or 10,000 years. But that is cold comfort for the hot days ahead.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is naturalist and writer from Ashland, Oregon, who wrote this piece during a residency at Playa, a retreat center for artists, writers and scientists on the shores of Oregon’s Summer Lake.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeWriters on the Range2012/09/18 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleNo longer the safest placehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/no-longer-the-safest-place
One ideal corner of the Northwest can’t escape environmental impacts from the rest of the world.My little corner of the West -- southern Oregon, between the Pacific Ocean and the high Cascades -- achieved a brief notoriety during the height of the world’s Cold War anxieties: It was listed as one of the safest places in the United States in the event of nuclear attack.

Distant from population centers and major military installations, and likely spared nuclear fallout borne on the westerly winds, this seemed like a good place to escape the world’s madness. At about that same time, in the 1970s, the wider region stretching from Northern California to British Columbia was re-imagined as “Ecotopia,” by writers and environmental activists.

This has remained a durable image of the Pacific Northwest. We like to think of ourselves as apart, as removed from the social and political frenzies, the soul-crushing sprawl, and the environmental degradation that afflict much of America. It’s true that to retain this vision we have had to switch to stronger and stronger prescriptions for our rose-colored glasses, but on a good day it is still possible to believe that we are somehow beyond the reach of the world’s troubles.

Well, this summer the world came to call. On June 5, the largest piece of debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami to reach American shores washed up on lovely Agate Beach just north of Newport, Ore. This floating dock, 65 feet long and weighing over 150 tons, was, in effect, a biological bomb. At least 2 tons of its weight was made up of the bodies of living plants and animals -- more than 90 species and many of them not native to this side of the Pacific. Two of these species set off particularly shrill alarm bells for marine biologists: the North Pacific starfish and Wakame kelp. Both are on the Global Invasive Species Database list of the world’s 100 most dangerous invasive species. They pose a serious threat to the rich and productive ecosystems of our Pacific Coast.

In the days immediately following the arrival of the floating dock, state biologists worked feverishly to scrape down the hulk, burying the removed plants and animals under eight feet of dry sand and then going over the cleaned surface with blowtorches. The state rushed through a contract of over $84,000 to have the dock dismantled and removed overland, to prevent possible further spread of invasive organisms. Only time will tell if these herculean efforts were successful. A single female North Pacific starfish, for example, can produce 20 million eggs, and the larvae are almost impossible to detect as they disperse in plankton.

Meanwhile, I woke up this weekend to smoky skies hazing the valley. That instant stab of dread -- a wildfire in the surrounding mountains? Despite our relatively wet spring and cool summer, fire is always a fear here. Ten years ago, we spent weeks in the smoke of the 500,000-acre Biscuit Fire that burned across the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, 50 miles to the west of us. But a bit of checking on the Internet quickly revealed that this smoke was from much farther West; in fact, it was from Siberia. Some 5,000 miles from my hillside in Oregon, out-of-control forest fires are burning.

The Siberian smoke isn’t thick, although it can make life difficult for people with asthma. Its most obvious effect is that it produces beautiful sunsets. At least that means you can see it -- and I, for one, prefer that the pollution I’m exposed to is visible. Most of it, of course, is not. The industrial pollution that now routinely drifts across the Pacific from the factory chimneys of China and India contributes up to 20 percent of the ozone measured at West Coast cities. L

ast spring, measurements at the peak of Mount Bachelor, one of the Cascade Mountains’ pristine snow-covered volcanoes, found ozone levels higher than in downtown Los Angeles -- carried on the jet stream from China. Other studies have concluded that 20 percent of the mercury in Oregon’s Willamette River comes from the deposition of air pollution originating in Asia.

Today, the winds have changed, and the skies of southern Oregon are again a brilliant blue. The conifer forests are dark green, and the wild Rogue River runs cold and clear. But every breath I take contains some ozone from China, and somewhere out at sea, another hunk of tsunami debris is approaching, bearing invasive species from the other side of the world. We all breathe the same atmosphere, and the waters of one great, interconnected ocean break on all of our shores. This is one planet, after all, and there is no escaping our common troubles, even in Ecotopia.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2012/08/09 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleSurvival of the worthlesshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/survival-of-the-worthless
Let's hear it for the sagebrush solitude of the West -- especially those places
most Americans consider "worthless."I recently flew from my home in southern Oregon to Denver, giving me the opportunity to reflect on the fate of Western landscapes. As we took off from the Medford airport, it was easy to see how the neat pear orchards and vineyards of my compact valley are increasingly hemmed in by subdivisions. But we quickly left that view behind, as we passed over the large-scale patchwork of industrial forestry in the Cascades. A few minutes more, and we were above the Klamath Basin, one of the most thoroughly engineered drainages in the West, the vast rectangular impoundments filled here with water, there with potatoes, there with grazing cattle.

Onward we flew, ever eastward, and soon we were over ... nothing. Southeastern Oregon is about as much nothing as you can find in the Lower 48 these days. From 30,000 feet, it was an unlovely dun-colored expanse, sparsely smudged with vegetation and dissected by unremarkable canyons, its main feature a series of alkali lakes that not even a panoramic aerial view could render inviting. Every so often a dirt road made a long pale scratch, and I could be sure that there were cows down there somewhere, but the hand of man was remarkably just about absent. The reason was obvious: This place is worthless.

There used to be lots of worthless places in the West, left high and dry as the rivers of money rushed past, headed for California. There were areas like the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, the frozen alpine peaks of Colorado, the sun-baked valleys of Nevada, the cold, dry basins of Wyoming. Or, as they are now more familiarly known: Phoenix and Tucson, Aspen and Vail, Las Vegas, and the coalfields of the Powder River Basin. Worthlessness can be a remarkably temporary condition.

It is an oft-repeated saying among conservationists that people will protect only what they value. Well, yes, that's true. But this maxim, in its unqualified simplicity, fails to acknowledge two enormous considerations. First, "value" is relative. As residents of Wyoming will tell you, the traditional values of ranching and hunting are deeply and truly held in that state, but they have been powerless to prevent the destruction of both of them by energy development, an even higher value in the eyes (and bank accounts) of many. Second, the truism ignores the protective power of worthlessness. I have come to the sad conclusion that genuine worthlessness provides the only lasting protection that most wild country can hope for in the 21st century. Worthless land may be neglected, it may be casually abused, but it will not be utterly destroyed. Utter destruction takes money, and who wastes money on worthless land? Now, I'm certain some will object to my paradoxical glorification of worthlessness. Surely our most valued wild places are permanently protected by law; for example, our beloved national parks. It is inconceivable that Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon could be destroyed by development ... isn't it?

Perhaps. These treasured landscapes have relatively firm legal standing and legions of passionate defenders, and are secure at the moment. What about 20 years from now? That is merely an eye-blink in the timeframe of protection these places need and deserve. Twenty years further toward the end of oil, how will society value the uranium around the Grand Canyon, the geothermal riches of Yellowstone, the solar resources of Death Valley? Value is relative, and the value of energy will become almost unlimited as it grows ever more scarce.

Consider the orgy of destruction already being accepted in the name of energy extraction: hydrologic fracturing that threatens water supplies, tar sands development that is destroying huge areas of Canada's boreal forest, mountaintop removal that is reducing Appalachia to rubble. Can anyone believe that the oil endgame will not involve the pursuit of every last barrel, no matter what the consequences? It is not a metaphor to call this an addiction. In their desperation for a fix, junkies destroy what they once most valued: their homes, their families, their own physical and mental health. Will energy-addicted America behave any differently?

I haven't just flown over southeastern Oregon. I have stood on the ground there in spring, in that great solitude, breathing in the perfume of the sagebrush, resting my eyes on the wildflowers that cover the ground, listening to the warbles and trills of a sage thrasher pouring out his heart in the morning light. I have no deeper wish than that this land remains forever what it is today: empty, and worthless, and wild.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2011/09/16 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe way the West was can be seen againhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-way-the-west-was-can-be-seen-again
Watching sandhill cranes gather on the Platte River in Nebraska is like stepping into a time machine that takes you back to an unspoiled, wild West.Back when I was a boy, we used to roll our eyes at tiresome coots who would begin reminiscences with "Back when I was a boy..."

Today, as my 50s draw toward a close, I somehow find myself with a lot more sympathy for old-timers. I admit that recollections can be boring. And yet, as a naturalist, I spend a lot of time encouraging people to imagine the natural world as it once was and perhaps could be again -- healthy, wild and whole. But to really do that right, we need time machines.

Fortunately, time-machine tickets are available throughout the West, offered for the price of a few days' drive. The most well-known is probably Yellowstone National Park, where herds of bison and elk, the howling wolves and the bubbling mud pools transport us back to a world that we can imagine is unchanged since the Pleistocene.

The awe-inspiring abundance of wild America also survives in more humble surroundings. Take Kearney, Neb., for instance. A typical Great Plains small town, its grain silos and fast food restaurants caught in a web of highways and power lines, Kearney seems an unlikely place for transcendence. But it can be found here every spring, just a few miles out of town.

Every March, the largest concentration of sandhill cranes in the world crowds into a 30-mile stretch of the Platte River. They come here to fatten up for a few weeks on waste corn before resuming their journey to tundra breeding grounds that range from Canada to eastern Siberia.

One crane, all by itself, makes the world wild. What bird can match its dignity and calm deliberation, so powerfully matched with its thrilling call and the ecstatic abandon of its mating dances? That wildness, joined in flocks of tens of thousands, in turn gathered into a multitude that can reach half a million birds, tears aside the curtains that enclose our everyday lives, and sends us back to a time that, left to ourselves, we could never imagine.

My fellow time-travelers and I arrived at the Rowe Sanctuary on the Platte River in the late afternoon, while the cranes were still scattered across the harvested fields. Our observation blind was perched above a series of sandbars that are regularly scraped clean by the stewards of the sanctuary, doing the work of nature in these days of depleted river flows. The sandbars offer safe roosting places for the cranes, but only if they are free of entangling vegetation.

Paradoxically, it takes endless care to maintain wildness in the modern world. But it can be done: The Nebraska cranes teach us that.

The sunset was one of the most extraordinary I have ever seen, painting the horizon gold, then apricot and lavender. On cue, the cranes began to gather, filling the world with an extraordinary music. And what is the sound of this sonata for 50,000 cranes? It lacks melody. It lacks harmony. It is a bugle, it is the croak of a frog, it is a slow ripping of canvas, it builds, it gathers, it is a lamentation, an ecstasy, a roar. It pressed us to the earth, speechless.

Finally, the color drained from the sky, and the birds began to crowd the sandbars, forming billowing groves of cranes. By last light, they were a solid forest, grown to fill the shallows between the islands, their toes rooted in the moving river, their crowns tossed by the wind in their blood. Above the Platte, the Big Dipper stood upright on its tail, as if it had spilled out this flood of life.

We walked back to the buses in silence, very different from the excited chatter of our outward hike. The night sky became the color of iron, an iron bell that continued to resound in the darkness, with the echo of a world that only our short memory calls ancient, that only our self-regard finds astonishing.

There is an age-old phenomenon that has recently acquired a name --"shifting baselines." This describes the natural tendency of each generation to accept the world they inhabit as normal, as the baseline against which change is to be measured. In terms of nature, this means that the character of wildness in the land, or the abundance of wildlife in our lives, once lost, is not missed -- cannot be missed -- by those who have never experienced it.

As an antidote, I offer this: Go to Yellowstone or Nebraska in the spring, to your local national wildlife refuge in the fall. Jump in your nearest time machine, and go.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland, Oregon

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2011/04/08 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBirding, fast and slowhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.9/birding-fast-and-slow
If Pepper Trail's Birdathon team had a theme song, it would be "Bat out of Hell."First, a confession: I am a serious birder. Maybe too serious: For 364 days a year, I lead field trips for beginners, share my spotting scope and am happy to explain the differences between, say, a song sparrow and a savannah sparrow to anyone who is interested (and, perhaps, to a few who might not be).

But on one day a year, Birdathon Day, all that changes. Birdathons are competitions to see who can record the most species in a 24-hour period. Ours is held at the height of spring migration, with teams fanning out across this corner of southern Oregon. It’s all for a good cause; we raise money for the educational programs of the local Rogue Valley Audubon Society. But the altruism ends there. This is birding stripped to its essence -- fast, hard and wild. If my team, the Falcons, had a theme song, it would be "Bat out of Hell." I know, I know, taxonomically inappropriate, but "Freebird" is way too mellow.

Don’t get the idea that anything goes. Like any sport, the Birdathon is governed by rules both inflexible and obscure. For example, though it is not necessary to actually see a bird in order to count it -- most, indeed, are only heard -- two team members must confirm all identifications. All sightings must also be within our county, though this doesn’t cramp our style too much because Jackson County is almost twice the size of Rhode Island. Finally, only birds native or naturalized in North America are acceptable.

This caused a heated controversy one year when we spotted an emu, the ostrich-like flightless bird of Australia, happily grazing in a riverside meadow. To my lasting bitterness, this bird was disqualified, even though it was living free and would probably never be recaptured by the emu farm down the road.

The Birdathon starts not at midnight but at 6 p.m., in order to accommodate the beer-fueled list-compilation and pizza party that begins 24 hours later. The four-man Falcons team (only once did we convince a woman to join us, and for some reason she didn’t volunteer again) piles into our battered rig, and we head for the mountains. The evening’s goal is to score as many high-elevation specialties as possible before nightfall and then to do a couple of hours hooting for owls before grabbing a few hours sleep and heading out again at 3 a.m. Then it’s more work for our expert owl hooter (every serious team has one of these indispensable specialists to lure owls) until first light at about 5 a.m., when all our attention switches to taking maximum advantage of the dawn chorus.

The route taken by each team is a closely held secret, honed over years of experience. The Falcons even have a few spots where we merely need to slow the car, roll down the window and score a highly local bird, after which we spray gravel and return to speed. A well-constructed route with minimum unproductive travel is the key to Birdathon victory and all the glory that it brings.

Yes, I have known that glory. The Falcons are the holder of the one-day county record, ticking off 152 species in 2008. But luck in birding, as in life, is a fickle mistress. This year the Falcons were dethroned by a team called the Great Grays, until now the Bad News Bears of southern Oregon’s high-stakes birding. As the ancient Greeks said, never count a man happy until the end of his days.

That was just last week, and the wounds are beginning to heal. Today, I returned to my normal birding ways, walking with a friend along the creek near my house. Standing for an hour in one spot in a grove of willows, we watched half a dozen species of jewel-like warblers weave through the fresh green leaves, and I thought about their amazing journeys between the boreal forests of Canada and the jungles of Mexico.

I also heard the distinctive squeak and bubble of cowbirds and explained how they never care for their young, but lay their eggs in the nests of hapless "hosts." A chickadee flew by with fluff to line his nest cavity high in a snag, and I felt boundless respect for the resilience of this tiny bird, survivor of our hard and leafless winters.

Once a year, fast is fun. But on every other day, let my birding be slow.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2010/05/24 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBear witness to climate changehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/bear-witness-to-climate-change
To imagine what your corner of the West will be like in a warmer climate, consider how different plants and animals are at a lower elevation.One thing I love about the West is that so many people know their elevations. I doubt that many citizens of Atlanta take pride in their thousand-foot-high city. But everyone knows that Denver is a mile high, and most of us are well aware of the elevation of whatever high pass we have to cross in the wintertime. This knowledge of our place in the topography ties us to the land in a profound way, and soon, it will open our eyes to the progress of climate change.

My house sits at about 2,300 feet in the foothills of Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains. Over the 15 years I've lived here, I've learned that this is an elevation where things change. Most winters, there are days when the snow piles up on our street, though just 100 feet down slope, the roads are clear. Below us, the natural vegetation is oak woodland; above us, the conifers begin to close ranks into a proper forest. Every spring, the acorn-loving Scrub Jays and the conifer-dwelling Steller's Jays do battle over our yard.

This invisible ecological boundary has probably been fairly stable for centuries, wavering a few hundred feet up and down the hillsides with short-term climate fluctuations. It has remained even as the Oregon landscape has been completely transformed over the past 160 years of European settlement. It has remained because it is based not on biology, but on physics. The average temperature decreases by 3.5° Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain, because the thinner air at higher altitudes can hold less heat. Cooler temperatures change both the water regime -- especially the snow level -- and the fire danger, which together do much to determine vegetation in the West. And so, physics and biology have collaborated to create a noticeable environmental transition right about where I live.

Today, that transition is in transition. The physics that relates temperature to elevation isn't changing, but the baseline temperature is. If global warming produces a 3-4 degree increase in annual average temperature by 2100, as most models suggest, my house will find itself in the climate and vegetation now found 1,000 feet lower. No more snow to deal with, but my Douglas firs probably won't make it, and good-bye, Steller's Jays. Hello, clammy winter fog and a lot more summer days over 100 degrees. It's not a happy picture.

But the truly significant changes will be happening higher, on the 4,000-6,000 foot-high ridges that ring our valley and hold the snow that melts in the spring to feed our creeks and rivers. More than by any other change, global warming threatens the West with a seemingly simple trick: changing snow into rain. Without snowmelt, even if total precipitation remains exactly the same, we are in for a lot of trouble. The timed release of water from snow keeps forest soils moist well into the summer, buffers streams from floods, and allows irrigation districts to manage water distribution throughout the year. This January, I gaze across the valley toward the peaks, and I see no snow. I realize that this is likely a yearly anomaly, but such sights will become the norm soon enough. When that happens, will the West be able to sustain the population we have now, much less the population growth that so many boosters still promote?

This vision of the future has me looking at the topography in a new way. I spent much of the past summer climbing up and down the walls of my valley, ever mindful of the elevation. My friend Jim Chamberlain and I documented these familiar landscapes as if for the first time, collecting natural history information, making notes and taking photographs. Together, we produced a profile of our environment as it is, and a series of meditations on what is to come. This work (available at www.shiftingpatterns.org) has become a focus for community education and discussion about climate change.

Here is what I urge you to do: Look at your home topography. What is your elevation? When the talk of climate change blurs into a fog of generalizations, explore the elevations of places you know and love (Google Earth is a great tool for this). Then imagine them a few degrees hotter, with the climate now found hundreds or a thousand feet lower down the mountain.

That is our future, unless we can convince ourselves to get serious about climate change.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer who lives in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2010/02/04 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCow-free at lasthttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/cow-free-at-last
A ground-breaking agreement between ranchers and environmentalists means that Oregon’s beautiful Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is virtually cow-free.Deep in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument of southern Oregon lies my favorite wildflower meadow. This summer I need to step carefully, to avoid the lush clumps of Jacob's Ladder blossoms and the delicate columbines, their blooms nodding in the breeze. I breathe in the scents of the wild: the spice of the conifers, the earthy aroma of the wet meadow itself.

And today, for the first time in all my visits, the breeze carries no whiff of cow. Today, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is virtually cow-free.

Last April 15, a painstakingly negotiated deal between environmentalists and ranchers went into effect, retiring 46,345 acres of grazing leases inside the monument, as well as an additional 12,253 acres of grazing on adjacent public lands. Just under 94 percent of the national monument is now permanently closed to livestock grazing, and all the lease retirements occurred through voluntary buyouts, financed entirely by non-government funds raised by a local grassroots environmental group, the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council.

This is a watershed event in the history of the West. For the early settlers, all the dry and rocky country beyond the Great Plains was considered rangeland. Cows were turned loose everywhere: on the sagebrush flats of the Great Basin, the desert grasslands of the Southwest, the alpine meadows of the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, and the open pine forests of the inland plateaus and valleys. And everywhere the cows went, they fundamentally transformed the West.

Unlike native grazers such as elk and bison, cattle are riparian animals. They naturally cluster around rivers, streams, springs and wet meadows -- anywhere they can find water. And in their clustering, their trampling of overhanging banks, their stripping of riparian vegetation, their wallowing and their defecating, cattle rapidly and profoundly degraded the hydrology of half a continent.

The deep gullies and arroyos that mark the Western landscape are not, for the most part, natural. They resulted from severe erosion and down-cutting -- often to the bedrock -- of streams that once meandered through wet meadows.

Away from the streams, cattle impacts have been just as severe. The arid plant communities west of the Great Plains did not evolve with heavy grazing pressure. Following the introduction of cattle and sheep, it took very little time before native perennial bunchgrasses were overgrazed and the full-scale invasion of the West by aliens like cheatgrass, medusahead and toadflax began. Most of the arid West represents marginal habitat for cattle, and even though public lands are leased for a pittance at $1.35/month for each cow/calf pair, lease-holding ranchers still struggle to make a living.

A staggering 260 million acres are leased for livestock production by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, representing 92 percent of BLM and 69 percent of Forest Service land in the West. However, these public lands support only 1.4 percent of the cattle producers, and provide only 2 percent of the feed used by livestock in the United States. Never has so much land been sacrificed for the use of so few, producing so little benefit.

But let's leave the numbers behind. Walk yourself through a stretch of your local public land, where the cows are. Imagine it, if you can, cow-free. The damage may have been great, and the recovery will be slow. But this trail, now paved with cow dung and buzzing with flies, can be clean and quiet and scented only with wildflowers or sage. That stream, where the herd now stands in the sun-baked mud, could once again wander through a wet meadow, its trout-filled waters cool beneath the shade of clustering willows. That hillside, now skinned down to patches of compacted dirt and stubble, could once again be furred with bunchgrass and wildflowers.

The public lands of the West have far higher value as wildlife habitat, as the basis for our fragile water cycle, and as the last silent, open spaces on a crowded continent than as marginal pasture for cows. Lease by lease, district by district, we need to retire public lands grazing, so that one day, we'll be able to top any rise and look out across the broad land; healthy, whole, as it once was, as it should be: cow free. Here in southern Oregon, we've proven that it can be done.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherPoliticsWriters on the Range2009/08/20 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAn octopus wants to eat the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/17477
Pepper Trail says a proposed energy corridor for the
region will chew up huge amounts of public and private land:
Comments are due by Feb. 14.

What’s 3,500
feet wide, 6,055 miles long and 2.9 million acres big? That’s
wider than Hoover Dam, bigger than Yellowstone National Park and
almost three times as long as the Mississippi River. This behemoth
goes by the name of the West-Wide Energy Corridor, and if you live
in the West it could soon devour a landscape near you.

This huge new system of energy corridors was mandated by the Energy
Policy Act of 2005. You remember 2005: That was when newly
re-elected President Bush claimed a “mandate” and
Congress was controlled by Republicans. The Energy Policy Act was a
grab bag of tax breaks and incentives to various sectors of the
energy industry that failed to raise vehicle mileage standards or
take any other meaningful steps to reduce energy demand. Section
368 of the law directed the Secretaries of the departments of
Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy and Interior to designate
corridors on federal land in 11 Western states for oil, gas and
hydrogen pipelines and electrical power lines. These agencies have
now released the federal West-wide Energy Corridor Programmatic
Environmental Impact Statement, a three-volume document totaling
well over 1,000 pages.

If its bureaucratic verbiage numbs
the brain, its system maps should make anyone sit up and take
notice. Check them out at
http://corridoreis.anl.gov//eis/dmap/index.cfm They show a network
of cracks spreading across the West, from Puget Sound to El Paso,
and from San Diego to the Little Bighorn. On these maps, our
beloved West looks like a shattered and poorly mended dinner plate.
And that is an entirely accurate image.

These new energy
corridors -- averaging two-thirds of a mile wide -- will fracture a
landscape that is already a maze of hairline cracks -- the lines
made by highways, railroads and the current, comparatively delicate
energy rights-of-way. These existing corridors have been enough to
severely fragment habitat in the West, interfering with the
movements of pronghorn, elk and bison, denying undisturbed wild
areas to wolves and grizzly bears, and weakening the ecological
health of deserts, grasslands and forests.

The West-Wide
Energy Corridor, if enacted, would be a death sentence for many
wildlife populations. The corridors it outllnes would cross
national wildlife refuges, national recreation areas, national
monuments and national parks. One tentacle would split the Big Horn
Basin of Wyoming; another would run the length of
California’s Owens Valley between Sequoia and Death Valley
national parks; another would cut from Mesa Verde National Park in
Colorado to Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe.

You have to wonder why the government didn’t simply use the
existing system of energy corridors and rights of way. And here is
the government’s answer: ”This option was considered
but eliminated for a number of reasons. Many of the existing energy
corridors and utility rights-of-way … are sized for
relatively small transport systems (both in terms of capacity and
distance) and could neither support added systems nor be expanded
to accommodate additional energy transport facilities. These
limitations make them too fragmentary or localized to serve the
need for long-distance energy transport across the West.”

Well, many readers may think, fair enough. We do have to
upgrade our energy delivery systems, don’t we? Isn’t
this an example of the government being prudent and planning for
the future?

Arising out of the political context of 2005,
the Energy Policy Act did not entertain the possibility that energy
use could actually be reduced through conservation, and it gave
little consideration to local power generation by wind farms or
solar arrays, for example, that would not require massive,
long-distance energy corridors. In other words, the West-Wide
Energy Corridor was never a prudent attempt to plan for the future:
it simply takes a failed energy distribution model and makes it
bigger.

Then there’s the contentious issue of
property rights. On the maps, the lines representing the corridors
are frequently interrupted, only to pick up again after a gap.
Those gaps are private land; the map shows only the rights of way
proposed for federal land. Obviously, those gaps must be filled in,
and if you happen to be a landowner in the way, watch out!

The West-Wide Energy Corridor analysis is open for public
comment until Feb. 14, and so far, what appears to be a land grab
has received little media attention. If you value the integrity of
our public lands and the sanctity of private property, you owe it
to yourself to take a look at
http://corridoreis.anl.gov/eis/dmap/index.cfm

To me, it
looks like an octopus trying to devour the West.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and
writer in Ashland, Oregon.]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleYou can’t stop naturehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/17413
Pepper Trail warns us that we continue to tinker with
nature at our peril.

Why does it have to be
so complicated? All we ask of nature is to be able to do what we
want to do; no more, no less. We like to think of our impact on the
world as controlled and businesslike, with only one variable
changing at a time. But no matter how hard we try to keep things
simple, they won’t stay simple. Nature is not just one thing:
it’s everything. And it just won’t stop.

Take, for example, fires. They bother us all a lot --- that
ugliness, the blackened trees, the homeless wildlife and more often
lately, the homeless homeowners -- not to mention all the burned-up
timber. So for decades we have followed a simple rule: Stop forest
fires. The problem is that nature changes in response to change.
Without the cleansing effects of frequent burns, dense fuels
accumulate -- live saplings form dense thickets, dead brush piles
up -- and fires when they come are terrible to behold. Our best
efforts to protect the forests have made things worse.

Then there’s global warming. This one seems really unfair. We
didn’t think nature was even involved with it. All we did was
burn the cheapest, most perfect fuels we could find: fossil fuels.
This burning has produced almost miraculous economic and
technological growth. Who would have thought to worry about
changing the huge and seemingly unchangeable atmosphere? For many
decades -- no one. But all that time, as carbon dioxide levels
invisibly rose, nature was paying attention. It was changing, in
many, many ways. So now, when we have finally taken notice, we see
changes everywhere we look, from the vanished glaciers of
Kilimanjaro to the melting permafrost of Alaska, from the blooming
times of wildflowers to the breeding ranges of birds.

You’d think we might have learned one lesson by now: When it
comes to the environment, we don’t know what we are doing.
Or, more precisely, we might know one particular thing we’re
doing, but we have no idea of everything we’re doing. What to
do with this lesson? A reasonable response would be to exercise a
certain caution when it comes to “managing” nature. But
it doesn’t seem to be working that way, judging by some
proposals for dealing with global warming.

The logic goes
like this: The almost endlessly complicated consequences of global
warming come from one change -- rising carbon dioxide levels. So,
couldn’t we make just one other change to get things back to
the way they were? That is the temptation of the simple, and
apparently, it’s irresistible.

Some of the most
gifted scientists in the world have proposed technological
interventions to reverse or mask the effects of carbon dioxide
rise. These range from the seemingly plausible to the bizarre. In
the latter category is the idea of lofting a Saturn-like ring of
micro-satellites into orbit above the Earth, where they would cast
a cooling shadow over the equatorial regions.

More
plausible is the idea of “ocean fertilization,” adding
iron to the nutrient-rich but iron-poor open ocean. This would
stimulate algae blooms that would soak up carbon dioxide. When the
algae died and sank, the CO 2 would be effectively
“sequestered,” or removed from circulation. There have
been some small-scale tests of this concept, which suggest that it
could work. Several commercial firms now propose to begin adding
iron to the world’s oceans on a massive scale, selling the
resulting “carbon credits” to companies facing
penalties for their carbon dioxide emissions.

The
question is: Would nature let us change just this one thing? Or is
it more likely that drastically increasing algae in the
world’s oceans would have unanticipated effects on fisheries,
or the acidity of seawater, or perhaps even currents and global
weather patterns? Have we ever, even once, made a large change to
the global environment that did not produce unanticipated
consequences? Has nature ever let us change just one thing?

Ninety years ago, the American humorist H. L. Mencken
wrote: “There is always an easy solution to every human
problem -- neat, plausible and wrong.” Surely it’s time
to finally abandon the search for easy solutions and begin the task
of dealing with the mess that we have made of the world. We really
can’t delay any longer, because, for her part, Nature just
won’t stop.

Pepper Trail is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He is a biologist and writer in Ashland,
Oregon.]]>No publisherClimate ChangeWriters on the RangeEssaysArticle